Cases

Materialise pulled the sheet on a prototyped car that shows the unique solutions its Industrial Services & Software divisions can provide by joining forces. Being active in both the software and the rapid prototyping field gives Materialise the advantage to offer advanced, tailor-made solutions.
Below, you find more information about certain components of the prototyped BMW Mini Cooper car that were on show at the Materialise booth at Euromold.

Car door

In order to have a stronger prototype in the end, a honeycomb reinforcement structure has been designed directly on the STL-file with 3-matic software.

Lead times and costs were reduced tremendously by preparing the build platforms in an efficient way and building several large parts at once on the Materialise Mammoth machines.

RapidFit fixture structure

The car half is placed onto a RapidFit fixture system. This system enables professional part presentations, visual and quality control, transport, or operations on complex parts and is easily designed with Magics RapidFit software.

The fixture elements of the RapidFit structure are made by Materialise Industrial Services with selective laser sintering. This is an example of how RP technologies can perform as real production techniques. Selective Laser Sintering is considered to be a superior technology for Personalised Manufacturing.

Front and back wing

The Magics Support Generation Module generated optimal and easy to remove support structures in order to ensure high surface quality of the eventual stereolithography parts.

3-matic's advanced CAD and sketch operations split up the file in easy-to-build, -finish and -assemble components to facilitate the finishing work of the Industrial Services department.

Door handle

The automated 3D geometry based nesting module in Magics SmartSpace saved Materialise material and time as it maximized the number of parts in the build envelope of the Laser Sintering machine and minimized the build height. The Laser Sintering technology is suitable for larger amounts of parts, even for series of 50 to 100 pieces and more.

Wing mirror and rims in FDM

The fast, highly automated and advanced fixing functionality of Magics & 3-matic created a watertight STL model from a surface model in no time. This STL-file was used to build the final prototypes in ABS-material on the fused deposition modeling (FDM) machines, resulting in accurate components ready for functional testing.